We, Her Majesty's Prisoners
by Herrmitts
Summary: ... nine millimetre pension plan ...


**We, Her Majesty's Prisoners**

Father gets me a dress from Harrods, after that he's putting a gun in my hand and saying, the first thing you need to do is remember that everything that can be done is necessary. Sometimes people have to die for it, he says. We used to be friends, my father and I. People used to look at him and me. People used to ask me, are you Sir Hellsing's daughter.  
My father says, "The only way you can live forever is to die."  
He says, "And that's what vampires are."

Then he goes and dies. That's the sort of thing you're not meant to do really. For a while I'm standing on top of the world's tallest building. I'm standing on top of Westminster Palace. I'm standing on top of St. Paul's Cathedral. I'm hanging off the steeple like a bat. Like a great white-haired bat and then I'm on top of the BT Tower and I'm looking down. It's a cloudy day, but you can still see the ground.  
It's like being a cog. Up here you can see everything but still, none of it fits together. There are lots of other pieces all around you. Everywhere. But they don't do a thing. They just keep turning, and turning. Insignificant, inconsequential cogs. It's only when you look from the outside-in and you get a clue as to what it's all doing. All the cogs ticking around looking at each other.  
Push the button.  
Flick a switch.  
Pull a trigger.  
And then you wonder what happened, and you die. 

_ "- aid has been flooding in from the United States, France, Germany and all over the world after the devastating terrorist atrocity in London's city-centre. Casualties are still mounting within the rubble-strewn streets, and it's been confirmed by the government that the number of dead will likely be between one- and two-and-a-half million before the entire situation has been brought under control -"_

You wake up about that moment in a cold sweat and you open your eyes and you wonder what it was you had a dream about. I had a dream last night, but I forget what it was. You open your eyes. Sunday. But then every day is Sunday here. No clocks - but you don't need one. The entire place is one big timepiece. Its cogs are people. At first, I tried counting the number of times the Yeomen Warder walked outside the door - every fifteen minutes, every hour, by the hour. I needn't have bothered. There are three meals a day, regular as clockwork. Didn't know when they came, but the guards did - and they were exact, because that's what they were. Accurate. Methodical. Cogs.  
I had a dream - it was about nothing.  
Absolutely nothing.

_ The physical result of kinaesthesia is synesthesia - resultant from audience reaction to the movement._

They tell me I can't go home and I sit here with all the dried blood on my trousers and I am overjoyed.  
The hole in my cheek doesn't ever heal. I'm in a prison cell, in the Tower, and the punched in surface of my inner-cheek is bleeding. Until today it annoyed me that I had become a totally centred Zen Master within this zone of silence and nobody would notice. Nobody can hear me. I am alone. A reigning zone of bland food and cheap cigars and nothing.  
You give up your worldly possessions and your history and your life and your father and your religion and your faith and your trust and your belief and your deference and your passion and your hope and your self-respect and you go and live in a cell under a thousand years of stone and masonry and rooks. For all you know the world above is gone, because they won't even allow a radio down here.  
By contrast that makes me the calm centre of the universe. Me, with my oozing inner-cheek and its tight notches of surgical suture, cerebrally telling everyone how calm I am in the face of the greatest adversity God has known. Me, with my clothes unchanged for nine days and the big dried and crusty blood stains on my shirt-collar and trousers, I'm saying HELLO to the guard every time he opens the door to put another meal-tray on the table. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so great to be ENLIGHTENED like me. I controlled a vampire once, you know. Two in fact.  
Sigh.  
Look. HELLO! The guard opens the door and I've got a visitor. He's the first since Alucard.

Alucard came on the first day. What Alucard likes is a long, meandering conversation, preferably one-sided and with no benefit to anyone but his own twisted belief in suffering. Alucard would not make a good Zen Master. He's too much of a sadist to get the full pleasure out of knowing his self. He did his thing, with the glass and the grim smile. He had come the day after also. Twice. Two times on a single day - a few hours between each other.  
They'd tried to move his box. 

The Met. had gone in with SO19 and a team of Royal Engineers and _they_ had tried to move his box.  
You wake up in the Tower of London and you have a vampire _faux_ breathing down your neck so that he can tell you that the lackeys of the Round Table are trying to move _his_ box.  
"I didn't kill them, if that's what you're worried about, Master..." says Alucard, "I simply... put the wind up them." He sits on the chair, while I sit on the bed - smoking the last of the cigar rations. Tonguing the stitching on the inside of my mouth absently, that sphincter of puckered skin aching. The stitching is beginning to come loose. You can pluck it like a guitar. It's like listening to a band inside your head.  
Put the wind up them. He'd probably scrambled their brains like eggs.  
Alucard's second visit had been shorter. He said little. Thought a lot - or seemed to be thinking. You'd think a vampire didn't need to think, after all. After all that time alive, they should really have contemplated everything that needs to take place, wouldn't you say?

Today was Sunday. More than a week without Hellsing. It's like an exercise. Today's Sunday, Hellsing's been gone for a week and two days. London's gone. The world's over - for all is known. Now... what do you do?  
So today was Sunday? Really? Three meals per day; twenty-seven meals altogether - that meant... twenty-seven divided by three was nine. Nine days. Thursday night I was arrested. Maundy Thursday. Dear God, what sacrilege had been committed in His name? But it was Sunday - really was Sunday.

HELLO, Yeoman, is it breakfast all ready? Breakfast and visitor? How lovely.  
I first met Mr. Pendrick sitting in a prison cell under the Tower of London, on a Sunday, nine days after the end of Great Britain. I ate a proper Fry-up like Walter used to make. Sausages (Cumberland and bangers); bacon - that proper streaky bacon, not the stuff that shatters when your fork goes into it; two slices of black pudding; an egg, soft and runny, with a slice of bread and butter; two slices of fried bread; mushrooms; two tomatoes; and a pot of tea (Tetley's - not the real stuff, but it did its job). No baked beans.  
I didn't finish it. Left half of it on the plate, but I drank all the tea. You watch the world tick by down here and you cradle a cup of it while sitting on the bed. The clock moves onwards.

"Sir Integra, I'm Pendrick," he says and he smiles.

  


_" - law. I repeat, martial-law has been declared within the Greater London Area, including Essex and the Thames Estuary region. Road movement is for military and government vehicles only. Stay in your homes. Stay in your homes. The areas of Greater London, Essex and the Thames Estuary are now under martial-law. Crimes such as looting will be met with lethal force. The armed forces are here to protect you. The areas of Greater London, Essex and the Thames Estuary are now under martial-law. I repeat, martial-law has been declared within -"_

"Britain as you know it ceases to exist," says Pendrick, "Hundreds of thousands dead. Maybe millions." Prod. Prod. Prod. He can't keep still. Like some sort of bespectacled, lost little boy. Prods the half-eaten egg with the knife. You smoke the first of today's rations and you can feel it going into your lungs like coal-dust and you listen - very, very carefully.   
"Hellsing," Pendrick says, "Hellsing was set up."  
"Hellsing was the scapegoat, and they still are. As far as the world is concerned, the Hellsing Organisation is nothing but a private army working for," Pendrick says, "for al-Qaeda, or the IRA, or the International Jewish Conspiracy..."  
Silence.  
"Your name is dirt, Sir Integra."

HELLO! Look at me. HELLO. I am Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing. I am ZEN. That does not bother me. That is NOTHING. I am NOTHING. The Organisation is everything. What happens to the Organisation from here? How can we turn the cogs?  
Pendrick is a tall man but he looks like an accountant and he wears strong aftershave, probably to hide how badly I smell. Only washes from a hot jug down in this place. This isolation booth. This testing ground. This coffin.  
Alucard wouldn't like him. Too soft looking. Not fat soft... just - soft.

His name was Robert Dawson and he was thirty-six.  
His name was Robert Dawson and he will be thirty-six, forever.  
You don't know exactly what it's like shooting someone until you've tried it. I was eighteen and I shot Robert Dawson in the chest with a 9mm German Walther PPK semi-automatic handgun. The bullets had been grooved across their tips in a cross-shaped pattern so that when the bullet is fired it splits along the channels into a little star-burst flower of a dum-dum bullet and it exerts its force over a greater area so that the stinking bushel of steaming internal organs and blood and piss and shit explodes out of the target's back and it dies retching in its own bile.  
Robert Dawson had shown an interest in becoming a vampire. Robert Dawson was in the filofax of an up-and-coming New Age vampire who had a fetish for engaging in Tantric Sex and Pagan Rituals and other Lushly Capitalised Doings and had lots of interest in people who were willing to surrender their bodies to its tender mercies. Robert Dawson was thirty-six and he wanted to live forever because he had prostate cancer and he thought the vampire would be willing to help him.  
She was.  
You can get screwed by a vampire for hours and its like being screwed by a machine apparently. It's mechanical. Like all sex. So you kick down the vampire's door and you push lit cigarettes into its eyes until it talks and then you cut off its head and you burn its house down. Nothing walks out. And then you go to Robert Dawson's house in York and you kick down his front door and you say  
HELLO. Hello, Robert Dawson. I am Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing on my first field operation and this is Lieutenant Sherrington and this is Private Harris and this is Private Shoesmith and we are going to kill you. I am going ZEN in your uncomprehending face and then we tie you to a chair and we cut off your fingers with your kitchen knife and we line them out on the fold-out table you eat microwave meals off while you watch endless re-runs of game-shows and sitcoms on the BBC.  
Do you understand, Robert Dawson? Look. Outside. That's the world. That was your life. And it's gone. You are dead.  
The filofax gives three names but you can't do anymore after you've seen Robert Dawson coughing up his own frothy blood and trying to grasp why his LUNGS are sitting on his lap. I was eighteen and the other soldiers finished it off and then they rolled him up in carpet and buried him in the foundations of a construction site.  
Robert Dawson. Dying of cancer. Vampire who never made it.

Mr. Pendrick has never had to kill Robert Dawson. Mr. Pendrick probably hasn't killed anyone or anything that was big enough to get blood on him. Mr. Pendrick is the Queen's envoy for the important situation at hand. Mr. Pendrick is a fucking idiot and I am going to say so if he doesn't shut his mouth soon.  
The suture of my wound is loose and the blood coats my teeth and the tiny cracks between them. I find it amusing that Mr. Pendrick seems disturbed by that. A little bit of blood never hurt anyone. I've seen a man screaming with a hole in his chest so big that you can put both your arms through. That's blood. That's bleeding. This? This is a joke. This is enjoyment.  
I ask him how Walter is, and his face falls. Imagine a fake-sincere face that's actually sincere but doesn't want to be. That's it. He knows I won't like it but he doesn't want to admit that he cares.  
Soft.  
"Walter... Walter... oh, yes. Your butler." Pendrick says, "He was taken to the Acute Admissions Unit at University College Hospital."  
I say, Acute Admissions?  
Pendrick says, " - Apparently the nerve clusters in the lower vertebrae were twisted. I'm not too sure exactly how bad that is."

I do.  
There's a number of things that can happen with a spinal injury. We had a doctor at Hellsing, who was fired from a medical unit for striking his superior officer. Their loss. Our gain. His speciality was spinal injuries.  
There's a number of things that can happen with a spinal injury, he says as he looks at the man on the hospital bed.   
Higher in the spinal column the injury occurs, the more dysfunction you'll experience. Vertebra are named according to their location (he lifts the bedclothes and looks at the man underneath). The eight vertebra in the neck are called the Cervical Vertebra. The top vertebra is called C-1, the next is C-2, and so on and so on. Cervical injuries often cause a loss of function in the arms and legs, resulting in quadriplegia. A literal cripple. You know what I mean? Think Christopher Reeve. So much for Superman. The twelve vertebra in the chest (he points at the man on the bed as he speaks. Points at the thorax, even though the man's injury is to the upper thighs) are called the Thoracic Vertebra. The first thoracic vertebra, the T-1, is the vertebra where the top rib attaches.  
Injuries in the thoracic region are the ones that do the chest and the legs and result in paraplegia. The vertebra in the lower back between the thoracic vertebra, where the ribs attach, and the pelvis, the hip bone, are the Lumbar Vertebra. Then there's the sacral vertebra. They run from the pelvis to the end of the spinal column. Injuries to the five Lumbar vertebra, they're L-1 through L-5, or the five Sacral Vertebra, that being; guess what? S-1 through to S-5, result in some loss of functioning in the hips and legs. Lower down you are, better your chances.  
He looked at the guy's legs and he sees the clotted mass of tissue and muscle and the glittering bone shining through and he puts the blanket back up. He motions to the two orderlies and turns to you and says, he's not going to live.  
We built a mausoleum and a crematorium and there's a graveyard that's set-aside solely for Hellsing operatives. It grows like a weed.

It's bad, I say.  
Pendrick pauses. He says, "is it? I-"  
Wheelchair. I can see him now, wheeling himself around like a bad piece of animation on a cartoon. He pushes himself and it squeaks along like a pulley. The wound on my cheek is beginning to leak blood again.  
He lets the papers drop back down. "I'm sorry. I'm sure it must be hard on you."  
No. It's not hard. It's very simple. It's probably harder on him. So what now? Where's Alucard? Where's Seras? The rest of the men? Did this man Pendrick even know about what Hellsing did? Does he care? He could be my age and he probably doesn't even have a suspicion. Soft. They make them soft these days - If only they knew. What happened to Alucard?  
I am ZEN. God is my shepherd, I shall not want. Walter will be fine. He is safe.  
The first rule of Hellsing is you do not ask questions.

Alucard had come back on the third day. Only once. Only for an hour. He had held out his hand. Again. Like a scratched record - it doesn't matter how many times you tell him, he just keeps repeating himself. Alucard The Scratched Record. You scratch behind the ears of a pet dog, but that one's as likely to make you bite his hand as bite yours.

Contemplating look. Nice eyes. "We're reinstating you, Sir Integra. The Queen wants Hellsing back and operational - that's why I'm here. We want a new Hellsing." He says very carefully, and I smile the bloody smile again.  
I tongue the suppurating wound yet again. I have never tongued a man before. Or a woman. It is a new experience. Of course, I have had cuts - gashes - ulcers. But this is a hole. It is one inch in circumference and the skin is red-raw and bloody underneath. The pain is intense but it is exciting.  
I kissed a boy once.  
My father had been dead four years. I was seventeen. Walter and I went to a dinner-party, where rich people with too much money and too little common sense drink expensive wine and eat cloying food until they're paralytic.   
_Walter_. Oh, poor Walter.  
And then they talk, very loudly about how it's so good to be rich and so good to be a Lord and what would they know? How many of them deserved it? How many of them _needed_ to be a Lord?  
Oh, their fathers or their grandfathers may have won it. They might have fought and died or fought and lived or done something worthwhile for medicine or made something very impressive like a television (but he didn't get one) - but what have they done?  
Everything decays. Every good deed grows fat. Every cog that makes a name for itself eventually wears out and is replaced and each new cog is just as inauspicious as the rest - it just thinks its more important because it sits in the same place as the original - as the worthy.  
They never had to kill Robert Dawson.  
They never had to kill Uncle Richard.  
They never had _anything_.

He was seventeen also and he was the son of a holder of a KP - the Most Illustrious Order of St. Patrick. He was Irish, but Northern and he was a Protestant. We were the only two people who could really relate there. I was supposed to show my face, be the person my father was - but I am not my father.  
He is dead.  
The KP Boy and I talked for awhile and then he asked me if I would like to walk around the garden. It was a different place to the Manor. It was more open. Less imposing. It scared me to think people would paint their walls in pastels.  
You have changed, Walter said, but you haven't grown up. Enjoy yourself a little bit, Lady Integra.  
Sir Integra.  
I kissed the boy underneath the moon-shadow of the birch, hidden behind the shrubbery. We sat on a stone-bench made to look like Roman remains. He started pointing out the constellations to me. I knew them all already. How are you meant to track a vampire through woodland if you don't, and I laughed. It was so poor a pick-up attempt, and I'd read it in so many trashy novels that I laughed.  
He asked, is something wrong? and I told him there wasn't, so he took my hand.

That is why women get raped. They're too foolish to see where it's going and they let themselves get dragged along with whatever foolish little fancy takes their mind. HELLO. Wake up. Understand that what you are doing is going to be BAD for you.  
He leant across, and I sat there, and he kissed me.  
He broke off, and he looked at me. A question.

I walked away.

"We're reinstating you, Sir Integra. The Queen wants Hellsing back and operational - that's why I'm here. We want a new Hellsing."

Everything is cold. Everything is stone. Everything is quiet. The inside of the Tower is like a castle, but it's beyond even that. Castles are old and decrepit, obliterated - outmoded - historical jokes left there like skeletons. But the Tower. The Tower is life. There's more blood in this Tower than anywhere in the world. The killing fields of Ypres and Stalingrad and Gettysburg, the sea-waves around the Caribbean and the blasted mines underneath China - they are nothing. The Bloody Tower has seen it all.  
Torture, execution, imprisonment. Storming by proles. Battles across the parapets.  
There is a saying that if the rooks leave the Tower, Britain will fall.

The birds have their wings clipped.

We clip every bird's wings so that they can never grow too big. They can never fly the coop. They can never bring about destiny. In the gallery is the Crown Jewels and in the Tower there is Drake's Drum and on the parapets are the birds.  
Walking. Up. Up and up and up. Up stairs of basalt and brick - until we're outside. There iss scaffolding everywhere, with builders and tarps - but the sky is blue. Imagine, for a moment, that there is nothing in this world but grey. Nothing. Only grey. Everything you see is a shade of grey, darker or lighter. And then, suddenly, you are exposed to colour. That is me. I am exposed from nine days to colour and I feel like I'm dead. You sit on the step next to the door and wait for a while before you go on.  
"The Manor has remained in the hands of the State for the last week or so," says Pendrick. He comes along as well, because it is his job. Outside, his aftershave isn't as strong. He looks better in sunlight. Less pasty. Stronger. And I realise that my skin is anaemic. Blenched. "We bought it under the Mandatory Sale Act," Pendrick says, "I'm sure you'll find it much how it was left."  
There is a truck waiting. An army one - with camouflage paint-job. There are two soldiers with sand-coloured berets standing at the back of the truck, waiting. They're SAS. Irony. It's all irony. One of them opens the tail-board, chauffeur style. We four get into the back of the truck, and you can practically taste the testosterone being flung out of the two SAS men's pores. An unseen driver starts it up. The tail-board swings up and we're out. Out through Traitor's Gate.  
What happened to Alucard? I ask. Alucard is the life-line to Hellsing. He is history.  
"What about him?"  
Apart from the fact you tried to take his coffin away? You can't believe how innocent this man pretends to be. He should be a politician. Should be a television presenter, with the sincere insincere smile and the glasses and the thick heavy aftershave.  
"Oh." It was a small sound. "Not me... personally. I believe that was on the orders of the Round Table. They didn't want it being left there unnecessarily."  
Look. Out the back, there's the sun and the river and the street. It's still too bright to look without squinting.  
"Hmmm."

The two SAS men are sitting like Zen Masters, totally calm, totally serene. Apart from the loaded guns in their holsters, they could be on parade. It's a scary thing to see people like them in a fight. They're not normal soldiers, these two. No. These two are covert operatives.  
They have it in their eyes. In the Zen Master way they sit there and seem to contemplate everything and see nothing.  
The SAS assassinate IRA terrorists. They hem them in with two cars while the Provisional Irish Republican Army man is driving down the street and then three SAS men get out of each car and they shoot him. Riddle the car with bullets.  
Covert operatives make good vampire hunters, because they just don't care what they do. They never say, stop, I'm sorry, no, I don't want to. They do it.   
I dislike them because of that.   
They're no better than vampires.

"Have you... er... have you any idea what happened to Officer Victoria?" asks Pendrick.  
"Because, well," says Pendrick, after a moment, "actually, she's gone missing. We can't find her anywhere."

You wake up about that moment in a cold sweat and you open your eyes and you wonder what it was you had a dream about. I had a dream last night, but I forget what it was. You open your eyes, and you find you really are in the back of an army lorry with soft but strong bindings around your wrists, with an accountant who smells of aftershave and two Karmic assassins.  
And then you realise that you're not in a vacuum, and that there's noises out there. London is silent apart from the sirens.  
Uniforms and red and dust. And fires. Small fires, burning themselves out. Even the air tastes of ashes and blood. They are dead. Those people I was meant to be protecting are dead. I'd released Alucard's seals, hadn't I? Me. I'd done it. Who would have thought it would be this big? Big. Bigger. Biggest.

Imagine Hiroshima, but with the buildings still standing. Most of them anyway. Anything about eighty-feet shorn in half. Glass reflecting off the pavements and the road like rainbows. Blood splashed across asphalt. It's like the greatest disaster movie ever made and the world is your film-lot.  
If Universal wanted to make a film called Death of London, then they could make it a docu-drama. There is nothing left. London is ashes.  
One of the SAS began whistling _Bright Eyes_. They watch carefully - like hawks. Sand headed hawks with guns. It was all their fault. If they hadn't been so pig-headed about everything - let me do my job - there wouldn't be any of this. 

Travel north - east - towards Bovingdon.

ESCAPE. You are now leaving London! We hope you enjoyed it! The M1 ring-road. The world's greatest car-park is nothing but a long expanse of tarmac. It's a runway. You can land planes on it now, it's so empty.  
And quiet.  
It sometimes took me an hour, two hours, to get between the House and the City. Now it's gone. There is nothing but black tarmac and a few army vehicles parked at the side of the road like abandoned car-thefts. Walter driving the Silver Cloud.

Eventually you stop watching and close your eyes. You wait.

Fast-Forward. And eventually we arrive. Pull through the gates and as we pass I see them from the back of the van. A man in uniform closes them. He looks like someone I know from years ago, or from a dream, but for the life of me I can't remember. The truck stops. The gears grumbling - drawing to on the gravel front drive.  
OK, says Mr. Pendrick, the Queen's Envoy for this special situation, and he gets the two SAS men to open the tail-board and get out. OK, he says. We're here.  
I get out of the back of the van. The sun doesn't burn my eyes as much now, and I wait for Pendrick to get out too. The SAS men and the driver are standing next to the truck.

The House is black and gutted and fire-struck. Windows leer shattered and broken. The roof has caved in. And the grass - the grass is charcoal all around it where the embers fell and caught. You can't get more burnt than that. That is the archetype of a perfect torching operation, and for a moment I don't even realise that it's my house.  
Some curtains, grey and torn, still billow from the windows. There's smoke coming from the garden by the chapel. The chapel was burning. Who would dare to burn a chapel?  
Pendrick puts his hand on my shoulder and says, Miss Integra - it's over. His voice is hard.  
Is this some kind of joke?

There are a group of space-men wearing yellow-plastic walking about. They are carrying my furniture out of the remnants of the house.  
"Under Section 1, Treason Act 1795, you have been found guilty by the Crown for the crime of treason. The strongest sentence has been determined by the Crown. You shall be taken from your cell to a place of execution, where you shall by shot by firing squad."  
I look at him, and he looks at me and he doesn't look that soft anymore.  
You can't do this! I say. But they can. I know they can. The Queen won't stand for this!

"I'm sorry, Miss Integra," Pendrick says, and he nods to the two SAS men. Don't you realise. You have been found guilty.  
I am ZEN and I am walking. We're going past the chapel and I know what's blazing.  
There's a bonfire next to the chapel and its stacked with all my belongings. Wood is piled high and wide, like some sort of crazy flaming tepee.  
And a hole. There's a hole with a mound of dirt and a shovel next to it. Two men with suits are watching.  
Madness. Absolute madness. What do they expect to do without Hellsing?  
"We'll survive," says Pendrick. "We managed to do it before. I dare say we'll do it again."

The SAS man pushes down carefully, and I'm kneeling on the edge of the pit. It's deep. Deep enough and there's the earthy smell of clod and the great choking filth of ash and smoke. The smoke crawls into the air.  
What about Alucard, I ask. You really think he'll let you do this. And Pendrick's voice is resoundingly clear in my ear; my dear Miss Integra, what do you think the bonfire's for?  
Melt him down to salts and put him in a silver box and bury him, he says. Do you want him buried next to you, or far away?  
Dear God, this is a dream and in a moment I'm going to wake up.

Look. I am perfectly calm. I am ENLIGHTENED. You're mad, Pendrick. Do you really think to make me believe that this is real? Is this a test? Are you seeing whether I'm meant to beg for my life and surrender Hellsing?  
A pistol is cocked behind my left ear and I know now that it is not a trick. It is a Glock Model 17, Austrian plastic handgun with 9mm Parabellum rounds. SAS handgun of choice.

The blood is pouring out of my cheek and I can hear it pounding in my temple. The man in the suit is dusting dirt off his cuffs and he leans conspiratorially and talks to his partner.  
"Miss Integra Wingates Hellsing, you are hereby stripped of your title and peerage as ordered by Her Majesty, Elizabeth II Regina. Do you have any last words?"

Yes.

"And what are they?"

Yes. I just wish I'd said yes.

"Are those your last words?"

Yes.

Oh.  
  
Please.  
God.  
No.  
Please.  
Someone.  
Help.  
Me.  
Oh.  
God.  
Please.  
Please.  
No.  
Don't.  
Please.

From far away I can hear the lorry's radio and it is playing music. HELLO. I am Zen. Look. Look at me. I am calm. I am at PEACE. Inhale, exhale. I close my eyes.

_**You thought you were a clever girl  
Giving up your social whirl  
But you can't come back and be the first in line, oh no  
You're obsolete my baby  
My poor old-fashioned baby  
I said baby, baby, baby you're out of time**_

"God save the Queen," says Pendrick.

God save the Queen.

I wonder whether I'll hear the sh

  
  


_" - we interrupt this broadcast, as we now have a special announcement from the Prime-Minister on the ongoing disaster in London... - "_


End file.
